Study: Romantic Movies Harm Your Love Life

All of those who think that your love life will and should play out like a 1990s Meg Ryan flick raise your hands. If you've got a hand aloft, I've got a really great investment for you, a simply fabbbbulous opportunity where you just hand over your extra cash to a nice man named Bernie Madoff . . .

But seriously folks . . . there's a new study from an Edinburgh university -- Heriot Watt University -- which asserts that romantic comedies offer unrealistic portrayals of intimate relationships and that fans of the genre misapply those views to their own relationships, according to the BBC.

One of the authors of the study told the BBC:

"Marriage counselors often see couples who believe that sex should always be perfect, and if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it . . . We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people's minds . . . The problem is that while most of us know that the idea of a perfect relationship is unrealistic, some of us are still more influenced by media portrayals than we realize."

The movies reviewed for the study -- for the full list, click here -- included: You've Got Mail, My Best Friend's Wedding, America's Sweethearts, While You Were Sleeping, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and Two Weeks Notice.

So, as a public service to my readers, I'll take it upon myself to hereby declare that your romantic life will not be perpetually filled with happy endings (take that in whatever way you wish), romantic gestures, destiny-filled moments and kooky side-kick gal pals who are at your beck and call to over-analyze everything your loved one said and did. You are NOT Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts (circa the 1990s, that's important to note), nor are you Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson or Hugh Grant, titans of romantic comedies over the past decade.

When I told The Spouse about the study, he likened it to the fanciful delusions men might develop after visiting strip clubs or leafing through a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (where the women are airbrushed within an inch of their lives). The women at whom the men are leering, he suggested, provide men with irrational expectations as to what a woman should look like and, by the argument advanced in the study, could damage the men's love life. Touche Spouse!

Image credit: DVD town.

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: 'Mom Vote,' Political DNA and McCain/Fey on SNL

I find it grating when pollsters, in trying to predict what will happen on election day, categorize the "mom vote" as if it's one big monolithic vote. You know, you get pregnant, give birth or adopt a kid and then all them dames vote the same way, right? I find it a tad bit patronizing. I rarely hear folks trying to assess how dads are going to vote . . . because dads don't all vote the same way, just like moms don't all vote in the same way.

It was this snarky position that prompted a reporter from the BBC to seek me out and interview me about the "mom vote" for a radio interview that aired today. My interview is part of a larger BBC report on the U.S. women's vote. You can listen to the interview here.

Meanwhile, this weekend's Boston Globe ran a piece suggesting that at least half of your political inclinations hail from your DNA, saying that liberals and conservatives tend to have different reactions to various situations:

"Our place on the political spectrum -- liberal, conservative, or in between -- is powerfully influenced by genetics, new studies show. In the past year, researchers have demonstrated that the brains of liberals and conservatives are physically and functionally distinctive, suggesting that people on either side of the ideological divide are actually wired differently."

I must say, I'm not buyin' it. My family's all over the map when it comes to parties and candidates.

And, in these waning days of this presidential election, Senator John McCain pulled out all the stops and was very funny when he appeared on SNL this weekend alongside Tina Fey, who was playing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The premise of one of the sketches was that while Senator Barack Obama's campaign had enough money to buy primetime spots on a half-dozen networks this weekend, McCain's campaign could only afford a spot on QVC, but with the condition that he and Palin hawk items. (Link to video is here.)